Description
Children have always been impacted by both terrorist actions and counter-terrorism measures. Looking specifically at the UK context, since the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, laws, policies and practices that aim at protecting the nation’s security in the face of terrorist violence have affected – to varying degrees and in gendered, racialised and classed ways – the lives of children deemed to be from the ‘suspect community.’ However, in recent years, counter-terrorism laws and policies have directly targeted children. The include both “hard” and “soft” counter-terrorism measures such as: an unprecedented rise in children arrested for committing terrorism offences; designating radicalisation as a new safeguarding concern; increasing number of referrals to official counter-radicalisation programmes and removals of children from their homes due to suspected or actual radicalisation. Remarkably, these counter-terrorism measures have been justified by reference to child-welfare such that there now exists a nexus between child-welfare and national security such that security is welfare and welfare is security. How did we get here? Why has the child now become the subject of the counter-terrorist state? And what are the implications of this on children’s rights and on the relationship between the child and the state? This paper attempts to answer these questions by excavating the different (competing yet overlapping) conceptions of childhood that underpin, justify, and facilitate the securitisation of children. Some of these constructions are enduring, and some are rather new and striking. These constructions of childhood are also prescriptive. “Normal” childhood, they suggest, should be a-political, secular, and should be primarily located – and balanced – between the private sphere of the family home and the citizen-making school. The child is at once the family’s child and the (counter-terrorist) state’s child. A childhood lived online, or in political marches or demonstrations, is a dangerous childhood.
